I Garbugli della Rete - 1
June 1996

English translation

Necromancing and Navigating

One day, over eighty years ago, in a little Italian village called
Borgospesso, Martina the Bigot went to see the local priest. «Don Eusebio  she
whispered  we need an exorcism: the Doctor is either possessed by the Devil or is
practicing necromancy».

Don Eusebio was a wise man. He didnt worry. He asked Martina for an explanation. It
turned out that she had seen the Doctor speaking to the wall, and there was a voice coming
out of a mysterious device hanging on the wall.

That night, during the usual game of cards, Don Eusebio asked the Doctor. It turned out
that he had installed a telephone.

Times have changed. Nowadays, even before any relevant number of people has had a
chance to use a modem, everyone is talking about the internet. Big headlines in
newspapers, front-page articles in magazines... generally based on vague, unverified
hearsay.

The subject is in fashion; its discussed almost as often as football. Most people
think they know what they are talking about, but generally they dont. Even the experts
are quite confused. Every day someone comes up with some gee-whiz technical innovation,
but nobody seems to know the answer to a simple question: who is really using the net, and
what do people do with it?

The most widespread ideas are those that would have terrified old Martina. Two names
are in fashion: Neuromancer and Negroponte. I dont particularly enjoy William Gibsons writing style,
but in the Neuromancer trilogy, and in some of his short stories, his imagination is
extraordinary and fascinating. The problem is that too many people confuse science fiction
with reality  and believe that there really is something called cyberspace.

Nicholas Negroponte seems to be everywhere, including every other convention in Italy,
and too often quoted (or misquoted) by people who havent even read his books or articles.
If he (or his followers) said it would be better to move information than clutter
traffic and stand in line everyone would understand. But when they say its
better to move bits that atoms many people are scared. They imagine that if they
switch on a computer they will be swallowed into some unknown land by something like the teleportation
device in Star Trek  or one of those old movies where an unwary scientist becomes half
man, half fly.

We read some weird news. Afew days ago newspapers headlined The first wedding
via internet. Whats happened? People can get married online? How? It turns out that
they were married in the ordinary way, but sent photographs of the wedding to their
friends by e-mail.

The general assumption is that the web is everything and people online are all the
same.

How many online in Italy? We hear and read all sorts of figures, but the facts are
simple. So far, we are few. Above all, we are different.

Martinas grand-granddaughter is called Jusy. She is sixteen and spends five hours a
day in chat. She does so at quiet times, while her family is falling asleep in front of
the tv set and nobody worries about a busy telephone line. But in our country there is a
time charge on local calls: Jusy had some problems with her parents when they received the
phone bill.

A friend of mine has a computer at home: Pentium 100 with a gigabyte hard disk,
six-speed cd-rom, SoundBlaster, etcetera, and a 28.800 bps modem. He uses exclusively a
spreadsheet, mostly in his office. He has a mailbox, but reads it once a month and never
answers. His children played for a while but got bored. The Philippine housemaid
occasionally removes the dust from that strange abandoned machine.

A lady I know bought a modem to do some research on the web. After a few battles with
Yahoo and Altavista, outdated links and bothersome clutter, she is very
depressed. She is bright and determined, eventually she will find a way... but it will
take a while.

Another friend of mine, a very serious professor, hardly ever answers his e-mail. His
mailbox is a mess because he doesnt use a decent OLR. He spends hours on long-distance
telephone calls and sends twelve-page faxes. In a private IRC room, where we were supposed
to have a serious group discussion, he drove everybody mad by exiting and re-entering
every few minutes, each time with a new nickname, ranging from Dumbo to Chrome.